Madhya Pradesh’s wilderness areas inspired Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book – and it’s easy to see why Kanha National Park was a key influence. Its misted meadows and lush sal forests create the perfect setting for the real wildlife drama that unfolds here. And tigers have a starring role. While there are several well-known […]

They’re the apex predators seriously threatened by poaching and shrinking habitats, yet few animals capture the imagination like the big cats. We put their image on everything from car company logos to footy jerseys – yet the reality of life for these sentient wildlings is so far removed from our everyday understanding that it takes […]

The Amur tiger is living large in Durminskoye Reserve, thanks to custodian Alexander Batalov and his team of five foresters. They patrol this 20,000-hectare slice of the Ussuri Taiga, outsmarting poachers, making sure the tigers’ prey don’t starve in the brutal -40˙C Siberian winters, and spending hours in the forest, on foot and on snowmobiles, setting up […]

This is Zhorik – he lives just outside the village of Kutuzovka, in Far East Russia, and I went to visit him there recently. He’s a special bloke. As a cub, he was snatched from the wild and sold to a circus. One evening, as he was having dinner, a sharp bone pierced through his […]

If you’ve ever had the privilege of seeing a wild cheetah, you’ll understand Dr Laurie Marker’s lifelong obsession – there’s plenty to love about these intriguing (and mega photogenic) felines. They have a tough time coexisting with bigger predators like lions, hyenas and leopards – yet they can hit speeds of 120km/h and purr like domestic […]

Good naturalists can identify individual tigers just by looking at their head markings. Me? Even when this wild Bengal guy was less than two metres away I couldn’t see the word “cat”, clear as day, between his ears. I was in too much of a fear-tizz, convinced he was about to leap into the open-top […]